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Creationists declare war over the brain.

"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."

His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN's east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

Now the institute is funding research into "non-material neuroscience". One recipient of its cash is Angus Menuge, a philosophy professor at Concordia University, Wisconsin, a Christian college, who testified in favour of teaching ID in state-funded high-schools at the 2005 "evolution hearings" in Kansas. Using a Discovery Institute grant, Menuge wrote Agents Under Fire, in which he argued that human cognitive capacities "require some non-natural explanation".

In June, James Porter Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology near Los Angeles and a Discovery Institute fellow, fanned the flames with Consciousness and the Existence of God. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness," he writes, "and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism's failure to provide a helpful explanation." Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God "is" consciousness, "the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning."

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use "mindful attention" to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology - the material brain is changing the material brain.

Those are just some choice paragraphs from the article. Click on the link to read the whole thing.

"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down.

That's rich. In psychology, we call this "projection."

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers

...but if it were true that "brain" and "mind" were two different things, with "mind" being immaterial...wouldn't that mean that no mere injury to the brain could possibly change the "mind," (i.e., personality)? Don't all those cases of personality change due to brain injury mean precisely that the brain and the mind are the same thing...or, better yet, that the "mind" is a phenomenon of the functioning of the brain?

My thoughts exactly Conor. These look like the exact same arguments made when theists thought the mind was in the gut and then in the heart. It's nothing new, it's just getting louder to the newfound acceptance in society of snakeoil and sugarpills in the forms of homeopathy and "traditional medicines".

The 'Mind' is immaterial in the sense that it is not a physical, material object in itself, it is more like a process, referring to a linked sequence of events, ie 'thoughts', which are also not explicitly bits of 'matter', but are closely linked to changes of state in networks of material objects, ie, neurones.

The 'materialism' these people are ridiculing is a idea that relates to an obsolete philosophy which assumes that there is 'nothing but' matter. This ultimate reductionism is the other end of the spectrum from the opposite error, namely Platonic Idealism. Ironically, Plato was still mired in the same misconception, that for 'something' to 'exist', it had to be constituted of some analogue of matter, but on a 'higher' plane.

My point is that there are nouns which refer to genuine abstract concepts, ie no 'substance', but describe attributes of physical objects, static or dynamic relationships between bits of matter (patterns, structure and processes).

Even simple things like 'height' - it is a noun, but it is not made of matter, it is an attribute of a a physical object. It would be nonsense to say 'height' is a supernatural entity, it is meaningless outside a physical universe.

It seems to me that 'mind' and/or 'consciousness' are referring to yet another process, or perhaps better seen as a set of processes made up of the interactions of neurones in a brain.

Rambling a bit here as I try to convey these ideas...

It is important to realize that to understand 'reality' we have to organise our observations and ideas into a hierarchy of 'levels of description'.

These days we start at the level of quarks, leptons, etc and their interactions. We have quite a lot of workable theories, especially Quantum Mechanics, describing the way these entities behave, altho far from complete.

Then we could jump to the level of atoms, which are made up of these more 'elementary' particles. For many purposes, rather than describing everything in terms of the motions of sub-atomic particles, we use Quantum Theory etc to explain and predict the properties of atoms, then have a whole new level of description where we are only concerned with the behaviour of collections of atoms, and the structured groups of atoms we call molecules. At this level we can start to talk about gases, liquids and solids, and develop theories and laws about the behaviour of these collections of atoms, which are themselves collections of sub-atomic particles, without having to express everything in terms of quantum mechanics.

The patterns of interaction of large collections of atoms and molecules shade into Chemistry, where we talk about acids and alkalis, salts and other categories of 'chemicals'. So, while quantum theory may shed some insight into the nature of chemical interactions, it would be totally unmanageable to describe the chemical process of, say, extraction of gasoline from crude oil in terms of quantum wave-functions.

And so on through bio-chemistry into biology, into the behaviours of living organisms, group dynamics of social animals (including homo sapiens). Other parallel disciplines such as systems theory, especially the study of complex systems, which actually in no way depend on quantum ideas, give us tools and frameworks to help understand complex real-world phenomena, all the way up to human society and economies, etc, and of course, probably the pinnacle of this hierarchy of complex phenomena, at least from our point of view, consciousness and the mind.

My point is that you can in principle explain the universe in terms of interacting quarks, etc, but examined at this level it is extremely unlikely that you make sense of the concept of 'living organisms' - you need to step back and up several levels in the hierarchy of ideas to deal with such entities. The "materialism" these people refer to seems to me to describe a world-view stuck at the lowest levels of description, blind to the full scope of the modern 'naturalistic' perception of reality.

if it were true that "brain" and "mind" were two different things, with "mind" being immaterial...wouldn't that mean that no mere injury to the brain could possibly change the "mind," (i.e., personality)?

Depends on what "immaterial" means. I can't imagine these fools are foolish enough to espouse this view, as a simple experiment with the claw end of a hammer proves them wrong.

Quote:

Don't all those cases of personality change due to brain injury mean precisely that the brain and the mind are the same thing...or, better yet, that the "mind" is a phenomenon of the functioning of the brain?

I have never understood why this is so difficult for theists to grasp. Mind and brain are not synonymous. The brain is a hunk of matter. Mind is a process. Anyone claiming that mind is independent of brain has a brobdingnagian task set before them. The evidence supporting mind as an emergent process of brain is staggering to say the least. To say the most, it's the only evidence there is for either side.

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

...but if it were true that "brain" and "mind" were two different things, with "mind" being immaterial...wouldn't that mean that no mere injury to the brain could possibly change the "mind," (i.e., personality)? Don't all those cases of personality change due to brain injury mean precisely that the brain and the mind are the same thing...or, better yet, that the "mind" is a phenomenon of the functioning of the brain?

Just asking.

Conor

They already have a bullshit explanation for this one. I saw a youtube video of some dualist talking about how are brains are like antennas. If you damage an antenna then the signals it receives will be distorted. Using that explanation they get to believe that souls are real and your personality will be ruined if your brain is damaged.

"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
British General Charles Napier while in India

"They already have a bullshit explanation for this one. I saw a youtube video of some dualist talking about how are brains are like antennas. If you damage an antenna then the signals it receives will be distorted. Using that explanation they get to believe that souls are real and your personality will be ruined if your brain is damaged."

"I can't imagine these fools are foolish enough to espouse this view, as a simple experiment with the claw end of a hammer proves them wrong."

My comment: OUCH!

Hambydammit also wrote: "I have never understood why this is so difficult for theists to grasp. Mind and brain are not synonymous. The brain is a hunk of matter. Mind is a process. Anyone claiming that mind is independent of brain has a brobdingnagian task set before them. The evidence supporting mind as an emergent process of brain is staggering to say the least. To say the most, it's the only evidence there is for either side."

My comment: Uh...at least I got it somewhat right on the second try...right? Even if I didn't...at least I'm learning (...or, in some cases, re-learning...) now. Mind is an emergent process of the brain...got it. But could you direct me to some discussions of the evidence supporting this? Thanks in advance.

They already have a bullshit explanation for this one. I saw a youtube video of some dualist talking about how are brains are like antennas. If you damage an antenna then the signals it receives will be distorted. Using that explanation they get to believe that souls are real and your personality will be ruined if your brain is damaged.

Hahahaha! Oh, that's a good one. I guess, then, that the different parts of the brain are "attuned" to different "frequencies" of the soul components (which now must have different aspects to it) so that the soul still remembers stuff that you don't. And somehow doesn't have any access to your brain all-of-a-sudden because you physically "tuned out" of just one aspect of an immaterial plane.

Hahahaha! Oh, that's a good one. I guess, then, that the different parts of the brain are "attuned" to different "frequencies" of the soul components (which now must have different aspects to it) so that the soul still remembers stuff that you don't. And somehow doesn't have any access to your brain all-of-a-sudden because you physically "tuned out" of just one aspect of an immaterial plane.

Right.

Where do people come up with this shit?

Their souls transmit it to them.

"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers

Uh...at least I got it somewhat right on the second try...right? Even if I didn't...at least I'm learning (...or, in some cases, re-learning...) now. Mind is an emergent process of the brain...got it. But could you direct me to some discussions of the evidence supporting this? Thanks in advance.

Yes, 'Consiousness Explained' - excellent book. Dennett manages to explain complex topics remarkably well, without over-simplifying, at least IMHO. Strongly recommended, as with any of his books on the mind and evolution, etc.

When god believers get caught in a lie they cop out by playing the "poof card"= god did it.

I am not a neurologist, but I know a bullshit claim when I see one and even a monkey can understand the absurdity of this claim.

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."ObamaCheck out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under BrianJames Rational Poet also on twitter under Brianrrs37

...but if it were true that "brain" and "mind" were two different things, with "mind" being immaterial...wouldn't that mean that no mere injury to the brain could possibly change the "mind," (i.e., personality)? Don't all those cases of personality change due to brain injury mean precisely that the brain and the mind are the same thing...or, better yet, that the "mind" is a phenomenon of the functioning of the brain?

Just asking.

Conor

Stop trying to use logic to fight creationists. It's like using the queens gambit against someone who thinks you are playing checkers.

"To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use "mindful attention" to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology - the material brain is changing the material brain."

So...

Are they saying that because you can use your brain that proves it's an antenna?

It is an interesting shift the Xians have made. It used to be that every scientific discovery was a work of the devil. Now every scientific study is evidence for Yahweh. You could produce a study demonstrating that most people find that shit smells bad and somehow this is evidence that God exists.

Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen